Grocery Store Music

February 2006

When I was a teenager, Mama and I were walking around a grocery store one day. A big band song was playing, and I made a derogatory remark about "grocery store music". Mama looked at me and laughed and said, "Oh, is that what it is?!" (That sort of music was popular when Mama graduated high school in 1940.) 

Now I'm in my mid-50's, and I notice that many of the stores are playing my music. I hear the Beatles all the time, the Beach Boys too, and many others. The other day when I was in the fabric store, Bob Dylan was on the muzak. (He never could carry a tune, bless his heart.) "That's Bob Dylan,"I said to the lady who was cutting my fabric. "Huh? Oh, really?" she said. I think she grew up before Bob Dylan. She looked more like a Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra person. 

 The Peddler's Mall flea market in Hopkinsville always plays music of the 1950's, mostly rock-and-roll. It's very cheerful. The toetapping rhythms put me in the right mood for looking at all that old junk in there. I'm sure that's what the mall owners have in mind.

I Like Hats

February 2006

When I was about 4 years old, I spent a few days with Grandma Barb and Gramp Sees (as we called him.) Grandma Barb took me to town and bought me a beautiful little hat. It was round and flat, made of white straw, with a ring of white daisies around the crown and long ribbon tails that hung down the back. 

I wore it on the train when I went home. Three other little children were traveling without adults, and the conductor assigned us to a set of facing seats. I suppose my hat was uncomfortable against the back of the seat. Anyway, I took it off, and one of the little boys sat on it and squished it. He also sat on my lunch bag and squished my marshmallow-top cookie! I still feel irritated, all these years later.

In the days of my early childhood (the 1950's) all the ladies wore hats to church. I especially remember the hats of Mrs. James Tapley, our pastor's wife, at the Church of the Nazarene in Ainsworth, Nebraska. She was young and pretty, and she had a hat for every outfit. One of her hats had a bumblebee hovering over a flower. I was enchanted with it. 

Even after hats were no longer de rigeur, my mother still kept several black hats which she wore to funerals.

I have a small collection of hats. I bought a couple of them at yard sales because they were pretty. They needed to be owned by someone who appreciated them. I wore one of them at Halloween last year and told people that it was my costume.

Marcus and Emma Eaton, Homesteaders

February 2006

Marcus and Emma (Hart) Eaton

About 1899, my great grandparents, Marcus and Emma (Hart) Eaton, came from Marshalltown, Iowa, with their daughters Cora and Violet (my maternal grandmother), and homesteaded in the Lavaca area of Cherry County, Nebraska. 

With a population of 20 (according to the Nebraska State Gazetteer, Business Directory and Farmers List for 1890-1891,) Lavaca was the Sandhill version of a post-hamlet.  It had 2 blacksmiths and a general merchandise store that probably doubled as a post office, as well as a school and probably a church or two. It was located about 25 miles southwest of Merriman on the extreme western edge of Cherry County.  The Lavaca Flats lie alongside the Niobrara River. It's an area of level land with good meadows, and nowadays, some center-pivot irrigated farmland. 

According to the 1886 map of the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad. a rail line ran through Valentine and Gordon and on to Douglas, Wyoming. The Homestead Office was in Valentine. Marcus and Emma probably rode the train as far as Merriman, but I have read about people who got off the train at Valentine and walked many miles through the sandhills to their homesteads.

During their years at Lavaca, Marcus and Emma added two more daughters to their family, Almira and Letha. Marcus drove the twice-weekly stage to Gordon, and was a road overseer for the Lavaca precinct, as well as farming his homestead.

As the girls grew up, Marcus and Emma wanted them to have a high school education. They sold their homestead in about 1912 and moved to Gordon.* There, the three younger girls completed high school, and Marcus operated a livery stable. Marcus was a farm boy, and he had worked as a teamster in Marshalltown before they came to Lavaca. He knew a lot about horses.

Emma died in 1929, and in 1931, Marcus lost his daughter, Violet (Eaton) Sees to influenza. Marcus visited his widowed son-in-law Harry Sees and his granddaughter, Doris (my mother) frequently after Violet's death.  Doris described Grandpa Eaton as a tidy, well-groomed fellow. Both she and her cousin Maxine Young (daughter of Letha Eaton Young) had fond memories an all-day trip with Grandpa Eaton in his car to visit Wounded Knee, just across the South Dakota line from Sheridan County, Nebraska. 

  

Marcus and Emma are buried in the Gordon, Nebraska city cemetery, adjacent to the graves of Violet Eaton Sees, Harry Sees, and Harry's second wife, Barbara Weber Sees. The Eaton graves were unmarked for many decades, but in 2014, my brother, Dwight Hill (a great-grandson,) had a tombstone installed.

When I was a little girl, my mother pointed out a certain frame building in Gordon as her Grandpa Eaton's livery stable. The building had big doors -- beyond that, I don't remember much about it. When I was in Gordon with Keely and Isaac in 2000, I tried to relocate it, but I learned that it had been torn down.  

One other thing of interest about my great-grandfather Marcus Eaton -- he remembered that as a little boy in Marshall County, Iowa, he played in the buffalo wallows on the prairie.

* In about 1917-1920, Violet Eaton returned to Lavaca as a schoolteacher. While Violet was teaching there and boarding with a school family, she had the memorable experience of discovering a mouse inside her nightgown after she had put it on and gone to bed. (Good family stories should be recorded and retold.) In 1940-42, my mother (Doris Sees Hill) taught in the same Lavaca school. As part of her contract, she was given a horse to ride to school. Some in the community remembered both her mother (Violet) and her grandparents (Marcus and Emma.)

Emma (Hart) Eaton was born in Polk County, Iowa, 06 Feb 1865, and died 19 Apr 1929 in Gordon, Sheridan County, Nebraska. Marcus Eaton was born in Marshall County, Iowa, 13 Sep 1861, and died 03 Jul 1942 in Gordon, Sheridan County, Nebraska. Marcus and Emma were married on 19 Nov 1889, in Mitchell, Davison County, South Dakota.

The Peterbang Kids

January 2006

Isaac and I were talking about the Peterbang Kids on the way home from town tonight. I don't know where my mother got their name. I don't know if the Peterbang story was a product of her imagination, or if it was something she remembered from her own childhood.

When I first learned about the Peterbang Kids, my family lived south of Johnstown, Nebraska. We had a blowout that we used as a landfill (as folks did in those days), and Mama said that the Peterbang Kids lived there.

The Peterbang Kids matched us exactly. They even had our names (except that their last name was Peterbang), and they looked exactly like us. The one big difference was that they were ornery and naughty, whereas we were sweet and nice. The Peterbangs loved to sneak into our house and do forbidden things and let us suffer the consequences!

When I was six, we moved to a ranch in southern Rock County, Nebraska. The Peterbang Kids slipped onto the very last truckload of stuff that was moved (according to Mama). And of course, they moved right into the junkpile in the blowout at the new place.

Even though I knew that the Peterbangs were imaginary, it was easy to imagine them living in the blowout. Many interesting pieces of junk had been thrown into the blowout over the years -- old cookstoves and broken chairs, rusted out pans and leaky chamber pots, bottles of all sorts, broken dishes, old magazines, snarls of wire, odd bits of broken machinery and every other thing you could imagine. There was plenty of everything that a Peterbang might need.

It was handy that they did make the move with us. When we did something naughty but not too serious, sometimes Mama laughed and said that she guessed the Peterbangs had been visiting again.

The years went by, and I became a teenager and then a grown-up, and finally, I almost forgot the Peterbangs. But when I had children, one of the Peterbangs found me again. It was the Peterbang girl who looks just like me. She was grown-up too, and she had a little girl and boy who looked exactly like my little girl and boy. Her children even had the very same names as my children (except that their last name was Peterbang, of course.)

The Peterbangs first found us in Berlin, and then they slipped onto the plane when we came to Kentucky. They settled in the gully in Clarence's pasture not far from the house. People had thrown a lot of old junk in the gully over the years, so they felt right at home.  And they certainly have caused a lot of mischief around here. Just ask my kids!

Second Cousins Reunited

January 2006

Today, I've been going through this year's Christmas cards, checking for new addresses. In doing so, I looked again at the card from my mother's cousin, Nellie Burk who lives in California, and smiled about what she wrote:

You know, the way I remember Doris goes way back to when we were little girls picking wild flowers on the Sees farm.

Nellie means that they were at the Harry Sees farm, which was Mama's home, of course. Mama and Nellie were second cousins, if I am counting correctly. Their maternal grandmothers, Emma (Hart) Eaton and Henrietta (Hart) Barto, were sisters. They had the same maternal great grandparents, Daniel Kennard Hart and Hester (Scotten) Hart.  The mothers of the two little girls were first cousins, and that makes the girls second cousins.

 
Mama and Nellie were good friends when they were little girls, but life separated them. Nellie's family moved to California during the Depression, and after Mama's mother, Violet (Eaton) Sees, died, I don't think Mama had much contact with the extended Hart family.

About 1990, Mama found Nellie's address on one of the Hart family newsletters that Bob Buchan of Rushville, Nebraska, published, and for the last years of Mama's life, these two cousins wrote many, many letters to each other.

Poison Ivy

January 2006

I have a small patch of itchy welts between two fingers of my left hand. It looks and feels a lot like poison ivy, so I washed it with Isaac's special poison ivy soap and put some calomine lotion on it. If it is poison ivy, I probably had second-hand contact through the cats or possibly the firewood.

My mom was very sensitive to poison ivy. My sister Charlotte breaks out terribly from it, and Isaac is very allergic to it also. So is Dennis. Keely has had it several times, but I don't think she is quite as sensitive as Isaac.

I wasn't allergic to poison ivy at all during my younger days but I exposed myself to it too many times, and now the allergy has developed. At one time, I could wade knee-deep in poison ivy to go fishing and not even break out. I wouldn't dream of doing that now! "Leaves of three, leave it be!"

I read once that birds will plant a friendly habitat for themselves in your yard, if you will let them. The article said to identify the area and stop mowing it. Then, put up some wires in the area for birds to perch on. In a few years, many seeds in the bird droppings will sprout and grow, and the birds will soon have all their favorite foods growing right in your yard. The article mentioned that poison ivy would probably be one of the plants that springs up.

Mama's Mastoiditis in the 1930s.

January 2006

Until Dennis got mastoiditis, my mother was the only person I had ever known who had suffered this problem. She had mastoiditis when she was about 8 years old. Obviously her ear (or ears) were badly infected because she had surgery on her mastoid bone (or bones.) I think she had some hearing loss from it.

In the early 1930's, money was tight. I imagine that Mama got pretty sick, and home remedies were attempted, before she finally saw a doctor. Her mom had passed away recently, and I don't think that Grandpa Harry Sees had remarried yet.

The doctor drove Mama in his car from Gordon, Nebraska, to the Mary Lanning Hospital in Hastings, Nebraska, for the surgery. It was a long trip -- over 200 miles -- and it must have been an exhausting and scary experience for a sick little girl. I am not sure how long she had to stay at the hospital, but surely they kept her for a few days.

Mama said that they stopped on the way home and had ice cream. I'm glad she had at least that one happy memory of the whole ordeal.

Infection-fighting antibiotics did not yet exist in the 1930s.